Level 3: Culture & Ecosystem
At this level, an organization has established proactive practices for managing open source software. The organization has a comprehensive policy in place for managing open source software, and it is consistently applied across the organization. The organization has a comprehensive inventory of open source software in use and manages it effectively. The organisation will begin to contribute to existing open source projects that it finds strategically useful. That is, becoming part of the open source community.
Cultural Embedding of Open Source
According to The TODO Group arganisations will:
create such internal mechanisms as ambassadors who promote usage of approved OSS products, educational programs on good OSS hygiene, and technical training or tuition reimbursement for skill building and certification in OSS. With these initiatives, an organization can grow its use of OSS and amplify its message that OSS is not only important but desirable and preferable to proprietary software products.
Ecosystem
At this level, individual employees may be contributing to the open source ecosystem as part of their job:
... organizations begin incentivizing their developers to work on OSS projects critical to their operations, to the degree that developers become highly active contributors or primary maintainers. To technology organizations, employing a contributor to a prominent OSS project is a valuable investment: most of their contributors to, say, the Linux kernel—the core component of the Linux operating system and the critical inter- face between computer hardware and software—are full-time employees (FTEs) whose job is to write code for Linux.
Further Reading
The OW2 Open Source Good Governance Initiative refers to this level as the "Culture Goal", and talks about how individuals within the organisation will need to understand GitHub or other open-source repositories in order to begin contributing to open source projects:
This Goal is concerned with developing an OSS culture that will help implementing best practices. It's about being part of the open source community, sharing experience. And being recognized. An individual perspective.
The TODO Group's maturity model refers to this level as "Evangelizing OSS Use and Ecosystem Participation".